10 Tips for Remote Teams that will make you more productive and happy
Remote work is part of our core culture at goodbag. In fact, my co-founder Chris and I met over a group discussion on facebook in 2015 when we brainstormed ideas about how to create the shopping bag 2.0. In the process I also worked from really remote places such as coffee shops in Luang Prabang in Laos to coworking spaces in Tulum, Mexico. In fact it wasn’t a year full-time into the project until I finally met our talented head of UI/UX in person — and mind you it wasn’t at a work-related meeting in our office but at a random Saturday night party organised by a close friend! Until that evening we had exchanged mails and messages on Slack and shared designs and points through sketches. While our team grew the need for office space was there but so was the need for a better and efficient way to organise the project remotely. Previously, Chris and I had to move to a cabin in the Swedish woods in order to participate in the IKEA Bootcamp programme and just last year we had to move for three months to Lisbon for Maze-X, so between trade fairs, sales and remote office every coffee shop and airport lounge became a desk. Today goodbag has a diverse team spread through three different timezones with 6 nationalities. Throughout the COVID-19 crisis it became apparent that home office and remote working culture should not be seen as a crisis solution but actually a huge benefit that can become an essential part of a company’s culture.
Here are some short tips on how to optimise your workflow from home that works really well for us:
1. Start your work day with a standup and schedule meetings! We have daily standup meetings in the morning where everybody shares what they did the previous day, what they plan to do today and what they need from everybody else. Everybody speaks in turn for 2–3 minutes and addresses their needs. If somebody needs something we schedule a meeting during the day or remain in the call to sort it out. For example, if a page needs to be redesigned then we schedule a call with all parties involved — design, marketing, development and ops ; if an app developer needs assets exported in a certain way then it’s up to the designer and developer to figure it out on their own — just like rolling your chair to another desk in the office everybody feels free to reach out to each other. There is a standup meeting with the product team (development, design and operations) and another one for sales and marketing which includes everybody that is relevant. However everybody on the team, regardless if they are in sales, design or development can join the other standup if they feel like they can contribute or address their needs. On Mondays we have a giant call where everybody gets to share what happened last week and what’s planned for the current week.
2. Share your screen! Almost every meeting, even the standup ones, usually involve screen-sharing. We use slack for calling and screen-sharing and it’s great that you can draw on other people’s screens :) It’s much easier to visualise and share a new design, describe a bug or even showcase numbers on excel.
3. Do a daily Checkout! At the end of the work day everybody shares what they were able to accomplish or not — without judgement — and which stories they are going to do the next day as well as any resources they might need from others. This gives a bit of heads-up for others to prepare and is the equivalent of leaving the office — from this point on calls are a no-go and respecting this means that anything that is not extremely urgent can wait until tomorrow.
4. Mute your mic! If you are not talking during a meeting mute your mic! That bagel you are munching on can be heard by everybody on the call ;)
5. Respect each other’s location and time-zones: Scheduling a meeting at 17:00 in London (WEST time) might feel OK at the moment but keep in mind that it’s 19:00 in EEST time. Same goes for scheduling meetings at 08:30 in the morning — it might actually be way before somebody had their wake-up coffee in the other side of Europe. The solution: define a 4–6 hour time-frame during the day where everybody should be available — for us this is between 10:00 and 16:00 CET.
6. One person — one headset:
Imagine the following scenario: Bob and Alice are in the office but Charlie is working from home and is joining in remotely. Everybody has been on the other side of a situation like this where there is not enough rapport between the people working remotely and the people in the office. How to solve this disadvantage: If Bob and Alice are in the same room, one of them has to move to another room for the meeting and use their own headset. This way the rapport remains on the same level for everybody involved and no party dominates the discussion.
7. Kanban boards with extra steps: There are plenty of resources on how your development team can run lean and agile whether you use JIRA, Asana or Trello. Whatever type of process and pipeline you have make sure it is online and make sure every team member has access to all the relevant boards, especially sales and marketing. It is so much easier if the sales and marketing people have access to a beta, staging or TestFlight version of the current app and infrastructure that they can work with and test. At the same time you make sure that everybody internally can play with the newest features and everybody is on board regarding who’s working on what.
8. User-Centered Design — stories instead of tasks: There are also plenty of resources on this but the short version is: Think of every new feature you implement in your app as a story from the user’s perspective. Instead of writing a task on the board “Implement email preferences settings” create the following story: “As an app user, I want to be able to unsubscribe from emails in the app”. The second version describes an actual story that can be reproduced by everybody and encompasses the user’s journey through every step of the process. Also, your sales and marketing people will love you for using plain English and will know what feature X actually means in terms of product design. As a bonus: Investors love reading Product Roadmaps written in plain English.
9. Onboardings: We have a lot of tools that we use in our pipeline so it makes sense to have onboarding sessions where everybody can join in and have a peek on how the infrastructure works — from how Kanban is organised to how everybody can submit translations on Weblate.
10. Don’t forget to have fun! Think about scheduling a Thursday midday call where you just keep in touch — work is off the table; it’s all about how everybody is doing and coping with the crisis.
Here are a list of useful tools that we use that make our remote work easier:
- Trello — for every type of board, even if it’s not Kanban-style — we even have a board full of crazy puns about achievement names
- Zeplin — this is where all the designs are uploaded and visually discussed
- Sketch cloud — for trying out mi-fi prototypes
- Gitlab — where we host our code
- Weblate — for translating every aspect of our product and keeping it in sync
- Slack — which has video calling with screen-sharing and great integration with all the services above
- and last but not least: classic pen & paper to start sketching your ideas :)
About goodbag
goodbag is the first reusable tote bag that lets you plant trees, collect plastic waste out of our oceans, or receive exclusive discounts every time you go shopping. All you need to do is to download the goodbag app, get a goodbag and start scanning it when you shop. To learn more about it, check out our website.
